CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: Congress must act on Iraq

President Barack Obama won the White House pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Along with passing health care reform and killing Osama bin Laden, it is one of the few promises that he kept. The public strongly supported bringing the troops home. And listening to Obama’s speeches, one got the impression that he wanted the withdrawal to be part of his enduring legacy.

That now looks unlikely.

Obama announced last Friday that he’d authorized limited air strikes in Northern Iraq, ostensibly to protect American diplomatic staff and refugees facing imminent slaughter. He promised that he wouldn’t embroil the United States in “another war in Iraq.” But the very next day, describing his intention to protect Kurdistan from the Islamist insurgent group ISIS, Obama admitted that he foresaw months of lethal strikes by America’s war planes.

There is a word for a president sending Air Force pilots to fire missiles and drop bombs on a country for months. That word is war.

Obama might not like the idea that he’ll be remembered as the president who restarted a war in Iraq, rather than the man who ended one, but it’s unethical for him to mislead Americans about the nature of his actions. A republic ought to enter every foreign conflict with its eyes open. This is no less true when it is attacking with war planes rather than “boots on the ground.”

Americans couldn’t help but understand the stakes during the Iraq War imprudently launched by George W. Bush. There was a months-long debate leading up to a vote in Congress. Obama is apparently trying to skip that phase of the process, even though he once declared, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

He was right. Obama is in breach of his own legal analysis, as well as the U.S. Constitution, which vests the Legislature, not the president, with the authority to declare war. The fault is not his alone. Legislators bear a large portion of the blame. Taking a vote in favor or war, or against it, is a perilous act for a member of Congress. They’re inescapably declaring themselves on a subject of great consequence. If they’re proven by later events to have judged poorly, they can be held accountable and ousted from office. And if there’s one thing that politicians hate, it’s the prospect of voters holding them accountable for their actions.

As a result, many legislators abdicate their Constitutional responsibilities on matters of war and peace. Biding their time as the White House rolls out a strategy, these lawmakers wait and see how the decisions turn out, and later pretend that they were possessed of great foresight. To end this perverse incentive, Americans should demand to know what their Congressional representatives think about the prospect of another war in Iraq right now.

This is when the public debate needs to happen, and when legislators must make themselves heard, if the democratic process is to have any effect on real-world events.

And make no mistake: This Iraq War could end as disastrously as the last one. “Many of the potential pitfalls we now face in Iraq are the same ones that beset the Bush presidencies and the Clinton administration,” foreign policy analyst Robin Wright argues. “Washington’s calculation is that air strikes will intimidate, contain, or push back an adversary, but the ISIS forces are not the hapless Iraqi Army. They are unlikely to melt away under pressure.”

He adds, “The direct American presence may galvanize more jihadis to the Islamic State,” and “as the U.S. confronts ISIS, the dangers that Americans will be targeted at home grow.”

Such are the stakes. They’re too big, in other words, to trust one man with the decision about what to do. America’s Legislature exists to act in moments like these.

Wake up, Congress!

Staff opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf also is a staff writer for the Atlantic.